Talking to Kate the great children's books scholar, I suddenly realized that, although I could make no reasonable claim that literature was important in this society, I could see that it has been very important to me. I can remember a few early reading experiences vividly, the events in those stories seem as important as events in my life.

House of Stairs made a tremendous impression upon me as a child. So, I reread it. At first I was alarmed by the clunky style. For example, the effort to change points of views between characters somewhat haphazardly, offering no change of prose style, no balance between how well characters are developed, and no depth or resolution. Or the occasional use of vocabulary or concepts that the characters would not possess. Or the fact that the book is set in a fantastic landscape that is described only once, briefly, at the beginning. To be fair, this last complaint may not be valid, because the author did allow the reader's imagination to construct the visual backdrop for the events, which elision might have made them all the more convincing: perhaps if he did describe the landscape in more detail, his idea of it might have smothered or contradicted my own.

In the movie Flash Gordon, Dr. Zarkov resists being brainwashed through force of will, reciting old memories, math problems, and singing to himself a Beatles song. This is a book about two kids—a feminine boy and a masculine girl—who resist being brainwashed. The adults, when they appear, are more alienating by far than even the squawking voices in the Peanuts cartoons.

I can now see that this fucked up book has made a tremendous impression on how I still see the world: a conspiracy of evil, short-sighted, technocrats are conditioning us to make us cruel to one another, so that we will be a population more useful in wartime. And most of the time they will be quite successful. The only way to resist them, to retain one's humanity and morality, is to leave the system and face starvation. That about sums up life in the USA. Capitalism is a cruelty-inducing, dehumanizing system of behavioral conditioning. I heard it here first.